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Don't bother running. You'll just die tired.
Zombies are people, too... Okay, dead people, with poor verbal skills. And the only communication they understand is blowing off their heads.
Infected are normal, law-abiding citizens who, through no fault of their own, have been infected with a horrible virus. This makes it okay to kill them.
- Infected game manual
Within the past couple days or hours, something very strange has happened. Maybe The Virus the government was working on got unleashed. Maybe a voodoo priest's spell went awry. Maybe an alien space probe broadcast a weird signal at the Earth, or fell to Earth and brought radiation with it. Maybe there's just no more room in Hell.
Whatever the cause, the result is the same; the recently dead have risen, en masse, to feed on the living. With each victim they claim, their numbers swell, and no force on Earth can contain them. As society collapses, it's up to the Big Damn Heroes to fight their way to safety or keep shooting until things blow over.
The Zombie Apocalypse has arrived.
Common to virtually all Zombie Apocalypse tales is that, regardless of the reason zombies attack living/non-infected people, they never attack other zombies. This makes some sense in stories where the zombies are manipulated by some force intent on attacking humanity, or where they need fresh human meat to survive, but it occurs even in films like 28 Days Later where The Virus is just supposed to make the infected vastly more angry and homicidal than before. Why they never turn on their own is rarely, if ever, addressed, although sometimes they can be seen fighting for food, but this never goes beyond pushing each other out of the way. This can be subverted if ordinary humans can avoid being attacked by pretending to be zombies.
The word "zombie" originated in the Voudun beliefs of the Caribbean, referring to a body "revived" and enslaved by a sorcerer known as a bokor. They were a monster of a culture born in forced labor, and the horror to these people was not getting eaten by a zombie, but becoming a zombie — a mindless, senseless, unfeeling slave for eternity. Some of the oldest aspects of zombie appearance are actually symptoms of tetrodotoxin poisoning, a neurotoxin used in certain voudun rituals. In this form, it has been known in America since the late 19th century.
However, it wasn't until the 1960s that George Romero's Night Of The Living Dead attached the word to the modern imagery described above. As Night was accidentally entered into the public domain due to an error in the end credits, it quickly became the object of imitation and emulation by many other directors. Most zombie invasion stories, even those not explicitly based on Romero's films, follow the same conventions, though there are major points of contention. While Romero is responsible for most of the "general" zombie conventions, the more specific and visible zombie tropes are more often inspired by the later works of John Russo, Night's co-writer. Most zombie movies mix-and-match conventions from the Romero and Russo canons. And the Infant Immortality trope gets smacked around a good bit because child zombies show up for additional creeping out factor in movies starting in the 21st Century.
The classic "Romero Rules" for zombies include:
- Whatever the cause of zombiism, the effect is pandemic; anyone who dies arises moments later as a zombie, whatever the cause of death, unless they suffer damage to the brain. And we do mean anyone, even children.
- The bite of a zombie is infectious, and is always a fatal injury, even if it seems a trivial scratch. This results in the victim returning as a zombie, much to the horror of the Zombie Infectee, though this is essentially coincidental, as zombification would equally result had the infectee died of, say, rabies. This rule is probably the source of the confusion between the first rules of the Romero and Russo rule sets.
- Zombies are slow-moving, lumbering, and stupid. Subversions of this have only recently appeared, but are increasingly common. In the Romero canon, it is a recurring theme that zombies become cleverer as time passes.
- Zombies are not significantly stronger than humans, though they are not disadvantaged by injury as humans are.
- It is generally the case that a single zombie is not a tremendous threat, owing largely to the previous two rules. The threat of zombies generally stems from the fact that they tend to turn up in mobs.
- Zombies can be killed only by destroying their brains (or destroying their entire body, as by immolation, which results in the same thing), though rendering them immobile is usually taken to be just as good.
- Zombies are compelled to eat the flesh of the living.
The "Russo Rules" are similar, but include several specific differences:
- Zombiism is The Virus. Zombiism results only from being bitten by another zombie, though event zero created the first zombie that starts off the chain reaction. Most non-Romero zombie films prefer this convention to Romero's, including the recent remake of Romero's Dawn of the Dead.
- A zombie bite results in zombification, though the transition is slow, with the victim becoming progressively more zombie-like. Zombies generally become stupider and less human over time, presumably as their brains decompose. A "recent" zombie may be able to suppress his monstrous tendencies for a time, and continue helping his former friends against the other zombies before being completely overwhelmed by the pain and hunger.
- Zombies are stronger than humans. Zombies are nigh-impossible to destroy, as even dismemberment simply creates roving, zombie body parts. They are vulnerable to damage to the brain as above, and to complete immolation — though the airborne smoke can also release The Virus.
- Zombies are specifically compelled to eat the brains of living humans. Zombies still possessing the power of speech may begin talking rather obsessively about smelling brains, before their minds deteriorate and leave them saying only, "Brains..." They say "brains" because Russo zombies find being dead very painful, and eating brains is the only thing that eases that perpetual agony. Once they've sated themselves, they can apparently talk and think normally in the interval before the hunger returns.
Neither set of rules explicitly states whether zombies can starve to death. Sometimes zombies can go forever without food, and sometimes they drop when they run out of energy. Whether they can actually digest what they eat also changes from source to source. Usually the issue never comes up because the human protagonists don't last long enough to find out. The Romero films, particularly Land of the Dead, at least strongly imply that zombies can go without food for a very long time. Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z assume that energy isn't an issue and zombies can keep moving indefinitely.
A factor that doesn't really belong to either set of rules is whether a zombie can continue to function underwater. In some examples humans are safe if they are living on remote islands, while in others zombies are able to either walk along the bottom, or at least float with the current and reach any point on the globe. (This is specifically discussed in World War Z, where zombies are able to do both, and the humans are baffled at how they are able to withstand the crushing pressure at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.)
A variant cosmology has popped up recently, in places like the 28 ... Later films. These zombies are not reanimated dead at all, but living people infected with the series' respective pathogens. This version of The Virus can't actually reanimate, only infect. Therefore, they are vulnerable to the same injuries that can kill a human being.
Another zombie variant that seems to be catching on, and also popularized by the 28 ... Later films, is the idea of the "fast" zombie. Rather than the slow, lumbering, stupid creatures seen in earlier works, these zombies are able to sprint as fast or faster than normal humans and are much more aggressive. This makes them a much more immediate threat, since a single zombie has the potential to wreak major havoc. "Fast" zombies have appeared in many recent zombie media, including the aforementioned 28 ... Later films, the Dawn of the Dead remake, Resident Evil 4 and 5, Half Life 2, Left 4 Dead, Dead Set and Zombieland.
Zombiism is almost always endemic to humans — animals are not generally affected in great numbers. This is reasonable under both Romero-style rules (as Zombiism often has quasi-religious implications such as "Hell being full"), and Russo-style rules (since few viruses can cross species boundaries), though it does avert common tropes about disease. Exceptions do crop up ( Resident Evil, for example, is packed to the brim with mutant zombie animals), but these will never fully take into account the major reason that zombie animals are so rare: it is all but impossible to tell anything like a coherent story while accurately conveying just how totally screwed humanity and the ecosystem would be under these conditions (something that the later Resident Evil films go out of their way to show). Exceptions will have one or two demon dogs, or maybe a flock of demon birds. Think a few million zombie humans is bad? It is estimated that in some major cities, rats outnumber humans at least eight to one. And if insects can be zombified, it's time to just lay down and die. Don't worry, it won't stick.
Another variation on the zombie theme would be Voudoun (known in Hollywood parlance as "Voodoo"). Those zombies may simply be mindless shamblers, or they may also be the flesh-eating type.
The improbability of zombie conquest of the earth when they follow these rules, given that the human body, zombified or not, is hardly a particularly effective adversary to modern military techniques and weapons, is almost never addressed. Note, though, that in most of the Russo zombie films, where zombiism is The Virus, the zombie menace is eventually contained. Under Romero rules, the pandemic nature of the effect does something to justify the trope: even in a secure, zombie-free enclave, any unexpected death, idiocy, or nibble can place the community at risk by placing a zombie within their defensive perimeter (as demonstrated in Land of the Dead). In 28 Days Later, the "zombies" are not a naturally sustainable population, and survivors need do nothing more than stay alive until the majority of them have starved to death. The Russo rules subvert the concerns about military techniques, as they usually serve to further the spread of The Virus. In World War Z, a (fairly nonsensical) explanation given is that a lot of modern weaponry is not very effective against zombies, and that unlike living soldiers, the undead do not lose morale, which means that they will never falter, break, or retreat from a battle. All of our weapons and offensive technologies are designed to kill humans; zombies don't suffer from shock, ruptured organs, etc. In addition, human soldiers are trained to aim for the center of mass, not the head, making kill-shots on zombies hard to achieve, even for trained soldiers. This doesn't change the fact that most modern ordnance is more than capable of tearing apart what are essentially semi-decomposed corpses.
Overwhelmingly, Zombie Apocalypse stories tend to fall into one of two categories of political allegory. The Zombie horror can be used to make a political statement against capitalism and consumerism, with zombies representing the bulk of humanity as unthinking (flesh-eating) sheep ( Zombies in the mall, anyone?). The other strain of zombie horror advocates hardcore individualism and libertarianism, again with the zombies as the "unthinking masses", but with an added emphasis on the heroic "well-prepared" survivalist, with Karmic Death to anyone who dares show compassion for others or cares about anything other than their own personal survival. Strangely, though zombies seem to fit the Aliens-As-Communists archetype, pro-capitalist, anti-communist zombie apocalypses are less common — and anything that would be considered patriotic is right out; the military is never anything but an obstacle at best, more often actively evil.
Often, zombie apocalypse stories are tied with a Science Is Bad message, or an allegory about human nature. ( Night Of The Living Dead contained an allegory for race relations, though Romero stated that it was unintentional. Its sequel, Dawn of the Dead, skewered American consumerism.)
Failure is often the only option in these stories; rarely do they have an ending that could be considered "happy" by typical standards, or indeed one where humanity survives as a species. Often people in these stories will be Not Using The Z Word.
The Zombie Apocalypse is so iconic that perfectly sane people will formulate emergency survival plans in case of shambling corpses. There are also survival guides available all over the web and in print.
Subtrope of Our Zombies Are Different. A member of The Undead trope family. See Night Of The Living Mooks for cases where zombies don't threaten the end of the world. See also Zombie Gait, Everythings Deader With Zombies. Braaaaaaiiiins....
Examples:
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Anime
- An episode of Samurai Champloo was a homage to Russo's work, with an asteroid blowing everyone up ala the nuclear bomb from the movie. This episode had Negative Continuity.
- The manga series, High School Of The Dead features a bunch of typical high school anime characters put into a zombie apocalypse, in which everybody who dies and was dead before almost immediately turns into a flesh-eating zombie. On a number of occasions, this manga pays homage to previous zombie movies and games.
- Notable in that the zombies are actually played as realistically as possible - the protagonists test and figure out that since the dead have no circulation, their eyes cannot possibly work, meaning that they find things from vibrations (throwing a wet cloth at a locker on the other side of a hallway will draw them to it); no circulation also means that with the local humidity, the zombies will decay to the point of uselessness in a little under a month (although nobody has a clue how the zombies are still moving).
- Spoofed in an episode of Urusei Yatsura. Alien toothaches are contagious, and if the sufferer bites three or four people, the pain will go away. In short order the entire classroom is filled with crazed teenagers with swollen faces and a burning need to bite each other and any non-infected that they can. It's like a very silly Zombie Apocalypse.
- Spoofed in the D Gray Man manga, the Science Department created Komuvitamin D in order to help people work overtime. However, it turned them into zombie-like people instead. The zombie arc was played mostly for comedy but there is one scene where it is discovered that a ghost of a girl experimented on didn't want the Black Order to leave and infected them so they would stay forever as mindless infected people. However, Komui starts reciting the names of all the kids that died from experimentation by the Black Order in order to find out her name, telling her that even if they leave, they will never forget her. It doesn't stay serious for long.
- In Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni, the justification for the Plan 34 massacre is that the Hate Plague Hinamizawa Syndrome could cause a Russo-style Zombie Apocalypse if it started spreading out of control. The manga-only chapter Onisarashi-hen shows precisely what happens when Plan 34 fails and the disease breaks quarantine: aside from a few isolated cases, life goes on as normal. The person who created Plan 34 deliberately lied about how dangerous the Syndrome was in order to get it approved.
- Parodied in the Thriller Bark arc of One Piece, where pretty much every single zombie convention is shattered. Here, zombies can move pretty quick, they get tired, they have resorted to fighting each other on a couple occasions, and bite from them has no effect; plus, the giant zombie is actually the fastest one of the bunch. However, this does make sense considering these zombie are made by implanting the personality and move set of a living person into a specially modified corpse.
- Thriller Bark zombies do feel no pain, however. They feel fear just fine, but not pain.
- In Dorohedoro, Hole gets a Zombie Apocalypse every year, and surviving it is as simple as being inside behind locked doors after midnight. This has been going on long enough that the braver (or stupider) denizens of Hole have turned it into a game, with prizes for killing a certain number of Zombies and everything.
Comic Books
- The Marvel Universe comic Marvel Zombies, spun off from Ultimate Fantastic Four, fused this with the Super Hero genre, to transform the superpowered characters into intelligent, Russo-style zombies. Zombiism in this series causes decay and an incredibly powerful craving for non-zombified human flesh. Although the virus can infect anyone, the super-powered zombies still kept their powers, and thus quickly overwhelmed and devoured all the defenseless, normal humans. The series starts on a world where they're the only ones left, having already hunted down and eaten every last non-zombie person on the planet.
- In addition, Marvel Zombies discusses why they do not turn on each other; zombie flesh is singularly unappetizing.
- And flesh imbued with the Power Cosmic is more nourishing to the zombie-ized superheroes.
- Also, the zombies are able to stay sane and focused after they have just eaten, though it was later revealed that the hunger also goes away if they go without eating flesh for a sufficient amount of time, making it more like a drug addition.
- Later on, they're attacking the main Marvel universe. Good thing Aaron Stack is a robot with chainsaw hands...
- The latest series also hints that the zombie virus is sentient, with various zombified characters referring to it as "the Hunger Gospel."
- The Goon is all about zombies, all are created by an unnamed Zombie Priest to be his army, most are fully sentient and can do pretty much anything (others are standard Romno) also the bulk of them are all former Mobsters.
- Amazingly, this even happened to The Smurfs. The Smurfs started out as a French comic book, and in the first issue, "The Black Smurfs", a Smurf is infected by a disease that turns him black, violent, and unable to speak. He then spreads the disease by biting other Smurfs, and Papa Smurf and the few other remaining normal Smurfs have to find a cure. This story, despite having nearly element of the modern Zombie Apocalypse, predated Night of the Living Dead by nine years.
- The Walking Dead, typical zombie story about a handful of survivors trying to seek shelter in an increasingly zombie world....if they don't kill each other first.
- Averted in an issue of BPRD (a spinoff of Hellboy), wherein a zombie outbreak occurs in a small European town and the zombies are brutally slaughtered by angry villagers with farming equipment before anyone else is infected.
- In Dead West, zombies rise up in a town built on ground where a Native American tribe was slaughtered. Then a Lawyer Friendly Cameo by the Man With No Name shows up and things get interesting.
- Zombies vs. Robots (and it's sequel Zombies vs. Robots vs. Amazons) starts out in a post zombie apocalypse world where man's former servants fight to protect the last uninfected baby.
- The recent 2000 AD strip Zombo, had this as a background in the far future, where a zombie apolcalyse is sweeping through the galaxy, and being hushed up by the government. The titular Zombo is a human/zombie hybrid (DON'T TRY TO THINK ABOUT IT) created by the govenment to fight back. It's a weird story, even by 2000AD standards...
- The Black Lantern Corps is a particularly nasty variation. The zombies are reanimated by flying rings that are programmed to automatically seek out corpses. As long as the rings are still worn, they can construct zombies out of almost anything, even empty skeletons, so damage to the brain doesn't kill them. They are neither slow nor stupid, regaining all the skills and abilities they had in life, including any superhuman powers. The number of Black Lanterns in existence is truly Legion, recruited from multiple different planets across the entire universe. Worst of all, while Black Lanterns do possess many elements of their former personalities, they will all kill any living thing they encounter without hesitation or remorse.
- They actually have to kill people to recharge their rings. One ripped out heart = 0.01% power restored to every ring. Not that they need the incentive.
- It needs to be a heart filled with one of the seven emotions in order to get change. Of course they still kill everyone because they're all assholes.
- Worse yet, even though they're magic zombies revived by power rings, their bites still carry part of The Virus. Hope the rest of the universe is more Genre Savvy than Donna Troy.
- The recent comic series Crossed is a 28-days series done with Garth Ennis's subtle touch. The infected become like the Reavers in Firefly. They do not lose their intelligence and they can talk. Oh, boy do they talk. The crossed will prey on each other if there are no uninfected around, and they get bored.
- Ennis previously wrote a zombie apocalypse story, Judgement Day, for Judge Dredd. The necromagus Sabbat has zombies attack every Mega-City on Earth, overrunning five (which Dredd has nuked) and killing three billion before being stopped. Mega-City One's response to the zombies, btw, is "Estimate sixty million plus! OPEN FIRE!"
- Another 2000AD strip, Defoe, involves a motley crew of adventurers fighting zombies in the 17th century using weapons provided by Isaac Newton and Robert Hook.
Film
- The above-mentioned Night Of The Living Dead and its sequels. After Night of the Living Dead the franchise fragmented, courtesy of John Russo doing his own sequel without George Romero's blessing. There have also been a number of unofficial and unlicensed sequels-in-name-only, since a quirk of copyright law put the original film into the public domain.
- Romero's Sequels:
- Russo's sequels:
- Return of the Living Dead
- Return of the Living Dead Part 2
- Return of the Living Dead 3, notable for being Squicky as all hell
- Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis
- Return of the Living Dead: Rave from the Grave
- Perhaps because it predates most of the zombie canon (not to be confused with the zombie cannon), Night actually avoids many of the "rules" it is credited with creating: the very first zombie we see moves as fast as a living human, has no outward signs of his state (aside from torn clothes), and displays rudimentary problem-solving skills. These skills are part of the Romero zombie canon, since later in Night you see other zombies using tools and stones are simple weapons, as well as in the following movies. Though in the rest of the canon, zombies take time to reacquire these skills, with Dawn, Day, and Land each showing survivors enjoying a respite from zombie attacks until the zombies develop new skills which allow them to thwart survivor defenses.
- 28 Days Later was a zombie film with non-undead zombies. Unlike the shambling, slow zombies of most films, these ones moved faster than the ordinary human. Also worth noting is that "The Infected" need not bite to infect; The virus can be spread through mere contact with their blood—it has to get into a mucous membrane, but the mouth and eyes will both do.
- The series continued in 28 Weeks Later.
- The Twenty-Eight series inspired the undead running zombies in the remake of Dawn of the Dead. Both were predated by Return of the Living Dead (1985).
- The zombies in [REC] and its American remake Quarantine work essentially the same way; it's explained as super-rabies. However, in the movie, the Zombie Apocalypse is an aggressively Defied Trope, the eponymous quarantine being enforced by snipers, a whole unit of US Army, the police, and as soon as everyone's dead, burning the structure down. [REC], had the zombies heal extremely quickly and of unknown origin.
- We can also ascribe the crestures from Lamberto Bava's Demoni as similar, or maybe even the inspiration (along with George Romero's The Crazies) for '28DaysLater''. The creatures are not actually zombies, more like monsters, but they work with zombie rules but they can also come out of girls' backs...
- Blending Zombie Apocalypse with Our Werewolves Are Different, Mulberry Street gives us a Virus that's transmissable by rats as well as humans (totally screwed was the phrase, wasn't it?), and turns infected people into rat-faced, rampaging cannibals. Subverted in that the Virus goes into remission at sunrise, restoring victims to normal, albeit not until after the protagonists have killed off their loved ones in self-defense or mercy. Similarly, Reliquary, the sequel to Relic, has those affected by a watered-down virus (it turned you into a horrific cocktail of dinosaur/primate DNA in the original) turned into light-shunning, psychotic, rat/lizard faced things. The even more watered down version just turned you into something like a 28 Days Later zombie.
- Italian director Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 took the Romero concept and increased the gore factor with such novel touches as a zombie fighting a shark underwater and a woman getting her eye gouged out with a sliver of wood.
- Shaun Of The Dead plays the concept for laughs, while at the same time remaining faithful to the style of the Romero films. However, the zombies are not only contained, but become a part of everyday life.
- Shaun Of The Dead also hilariously subverts the rule that zombies are mindless monsters bearing no resemblance to the former person, when Shaun's music-hating step-dad, after much zombified effort, manages to turn off a car radio. Also when Shaun's videogame-playing best friend still plays videogames with him. It also includes a Take That against the Twenty-Eight series.
- Brilliantly skewered in the 2006 film Fido, which occurs in an alternate 1950s that is in the heyday of a zombie post-apocalypse; the zombies have been tamed into domestic servitude by a control collar. Billy Connolly plays the titular character, one of the most charismatic shambling corpses ever shown on the big screen. This contributor saw it in a film festival early release, and heartily recommends it.
- Grindhouse: Planet Terror gleefully plays out all the classical zombie tropes in the style of a '70s B Movie.
- The Resident Evil based movie
triogy quadrilogy with Milla Jovovich is more straight forward survival horror with Milla playing a bit of a Mary Sue.
- Zombie Honeymoon is a quasi-Russo example. The man in question goes from completely sane to mindless flesh eater back and forth over the course of the movie.
- Ring of Darkness is about a Zombie Boyband who were created via voodoo, and are the flesh-eating variety. They score a few hits, then fade out of the public eye for 20 years, then come back as another band.
- Night Of The Creeps features the alien entity infection variety, where the victims could either remain sentient or become mindless shamblers looking to continue infecting others.
- It also inspired SLiTHER, retaining elements of the alien parasitic hive-minded worms, and also being a Homage to and an Affectionate Parody of zombie tropes.
- The French movie Les revenants (They Came Back in international release) has 70 million people climbing out of their graves... and peacefully returning to their old lives, trying to relearn speech and basic motor functions, and generally not killing anyone.
- Zombie Strippers, a zombie film set Twenty Minutes Into The Future in which the (still-in-power) Bush Administration creates zombies to act as soldiers in the ongoing wars in Iraq, Iran, Syria, France, Canada and Alaska, but infects the dancers at an illicit strip club. Because the virus preserves the intellect of zombified women (but not men), the eponymous Zombie Strippers are able to keep at their job, and even become better at it (death having freed them of all inhibitions), despite their penchant for eating anyone who ventures into the VIP room. The film is based on Ianesco's absurdist play The Rhinoceroses. I did not make up a single word of this summary.
- Not just anyone who ventures into the VIP room, but many patrons willingly accept invitations, totally ignoring the dwindling audience. At one point, the three strippers invite three randy young guys, then two make predictable "I could eat you alive" comments, but Jenna Jameson simply breaks the fourth wall
 with an adorable grin right into the camera.
- Dawn of the Dead (2004) has zombie bite victims begin sickening while still alive, and beginning to take on their zombified appearance before they die. The last thing to change are their eyes which take on an inhuman coloration immediately upon reanimation. The decomposition rate varies by how much damage they took while alive, as Zombies leave other Zombies alone.
- Gangs of the Dead aka Last Rites had homeless people zombies created by radiation from a meteor that fell to earth attacking so the Latino and black gangs had to more-or-less put off their fight to stay alive.
- Day of the Dead (2008) shows a virus that turns people into zombies starting out as flu symptoms. About half the town is infected and comes down with what is thought to be the flu, but then everyone infected simultaneously stops moving for about five minutes, then visibly rot from the inside out within seconds, killing them, and turning them into flesh-eating zombies.
- J'Accuse! aka I Accuse (1921) is possibly the earliest zombie apocalypse style movie ever made complete with political commentary. What starts as a typical patriotic war story of lost loves, turns into a Zombie apocalypse when the millions of dead soldiers of World War 1, march home from the battlefield to lay the blame for the war at the feet of those that stayed behind.
- The same premise makes up Joe Dante's Homecoming, where soldiers rise from the dead en masse to vote out the administration that sent them to war. It's only when said administration starts treating them like horror movie zombies that the violence begins...
- Zombieland uses the fast zombie variant. They aren't very clever at all except where required by the Rule Of Funny, and they were created by The Virus and can spread it through bites. They're also seemingly immune to pain, leading to the first two of the lead's Rules of Zombieland: Cardio (zombies can run fast, making it important to be able to run faster) and the Double Tap (put another bullet into the head after taking one down to make sure).
- ZA: Zombies Anonymous aka Last Rites of the Dead (2006) gives a new spin on the Zombie Apocalypse: the outbreak has happened, the dead are walking the earth, but they are still functioning — although mostly closeted — members of society. The movie is a good study on prejudice, showing the new world through the eyes of the recently-deceased Angela. Most of the living prefer the dead to stay dead, but most of the "mortally challenged" just want to be left alone; there are, of course, extremists on both sides, the living who actively hunt down the dead, and visa-versa. The social commentaries aren't subtle, and can be quite agitating at times, especially during the climax.
Literature
- Older Than Dirt aversion in The Epic Of Gilgamesh: the goddess Ishtar tells her father that if he doesn't help her get revenge on Gilgamesh for turning her down, she will break open the underworld and bring up the dead to consume the living, all of them. He, sensibly, agrees to her alternative.
- Max Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide is dedicated to zombie attacks. It's a must read for anyone who wants to make a zombie film, although its rules are not quite Romero and not quite Russo. It, in fact, does address how zombies are a particularly effective adversary to modern military techniques and weapons, listing their strengths and human weaknesses, among them the difficulty of making a head shot for modern soldiers and morale. How our weapons and tactics developed to fight humans, not the undead. How we break, while they don't, ever...
- One of the most discussed tips was about how it's better to have a nice accurate rifle than a more inaccurate machine gun, because it doesn't matter if you hit it ten times, the zombie isn't going to slow down much unless you shoot it in the head.
- Max Brooks' next effort, World War Z, takes Earth, chapter by chapter, from "Patient Zero" to Zombie Apocalypse and back again through the titular war, described through a series of fictitious interviews. Interviews conducted by Max Brooks, no less, an Author Avatar; memorably, when the Zombie Survival Guide is mentioned, and criticized, the "interviewer" says "Oh really?"
- The zombies decompose differently based on what part of the world they're in and what sort of things they encounter. Broken bones don't heal, but the zombie drags it along with them, and that wears away the dragging bits. Hot, humid weather will speed the decay. Cold enough weather will freeze them solid and stop further decay until the thaw, which will speed the decay again.
- In Teresa Edgerton's The Moon and the Thorn, Lord Cernach causes the Cauldron of Cerridwen to be recreated, which has the power to create an army of phantoms every twelve hours. Cernach's stated intention during the design phase of the work was to use it to extort concessions from Mochdreff's Governor, who preferred diplomacy to military action. Cernach becomes Ax Crazy, and uses the cauldron.
- Brian Keene's Dead Sea features a zombie plague that also affects cats, dogs, and rodents in addition to humans. After the characters flee the land for the sea, they discover that the plague is spreading to other mammals and eventually fish. By the end, the plague has reached the birds. Zombies do not result from demonic possession in this book as they do in his other books.
- The Rising and its sequel City of the Dead by Brian Keene play with several zombie tropes. As a result of a scientist messing with things he oughtn't to mess with, a portal to Dimension Hell is opened. Now, every time any animal above the level of "bug" dies it is possessed with a malignant, sadistic demon with one purpose: kill more creatures and let more of its buddies into the world. So we get zombie animals: zombie cats, zombie birds, zombie rats, zombie humpty-backed camels, heck, zombie alligators in New York City's sewer system. As noted in the introduction above, zombie animals equals totally screwed. At the end of the second novel, the zombies win. They succeed in wiping out all higher animals and move on to bugs, plants and unicellular creatures. Their ultimate goal is to make Earth a lifeless hulk before moving on to other worlds and then to storm the gates of Heaven itself. Heck of an ending to read just before bed time.
- Garry Kilworth's Welkin Weasels: Castle Storm features a being called a "ghoul", but effectively it's a zombie; the villain resurrects a badger corpse via (surprisingly disturbing for a kids' book) necromantic rituals. The resulting being obeys his every command, but displays a hint of personality in a Shout Out to Frankenstein when it begs him not to call it a "monster".
- In the Stephen King short story Home Delivery, an object orbiting the Earth (either an asteroid covered with seriously weird worm-like creatures, or it's worms all the way down..) is somehow causing the dead to reanimate. The story was originally published in a collection of Romero homages called The Book of the Dead.
- Similarly, Cell, another King zombie novel, takes a different approach - a cell phone signal wipes out anyone exposed to it of their memories, social restraint, and anything that makes them human, and makes them extremely violent to the point that the Twenty-Eight Series zombies look like bunny rabbits. Billions kill each other within seconds. This is a rare example where the newly-minted zombies attack everybody, including each other. At least at first..
- Cell is also a rare example of novel where the military's inability to do anything about the situation makes sense, without needing much justification. Just have a look at this list and you'll see why. Pay particular attention to the number of cell phones on Earth. That's four billion.
- In HP Lovecraft's Reanimator, Dr. Herbert West devises a chemical that will bring dead people back to life. Unfortunately the subjects either die (again) within minutes or turn into flesh-eating creatures that share more that a slight resemblance with your average zombie (they retain normal human strength and speed though). He eventually get better at reanimating, creating an intelligent zombie who can reanimate more bodies. The intelligent zombie then leads an army of other zombies to kill Dr. West.
- Hell, the spine is their weak spot (as the head is the weak spot in normal zombies), since the chemical is injected into the spine.
- Jonathan Maberry's book Zombie CSU The Forensics of the Living Dead is a What If scenario in book form. The author has interviewed Real Life Police, SWAT, doctors, hospitals, 911, and even DHS about what they would be doing to react if the Zombies began walking the earth. Delightfully enough, all the agencies and groups interviewed in the book had already given the question some consideration and had strategies formulated. Yes, even the DHS.
- Richard Matheson's 1954 book I Am Legend, while it was about vampires and not zombies, is an important precursor to the genre. Matheson's novel was adapted into the films The Last Man on Earth, the most faithful adaptation, and later into The Omega Man, which apes the then-recent Night to a degree and turns the vampires into insane albino mutants produced by biological warfare. The most recent adaptation, I Am Legend in 2007, has the infected more like an odd cross between zombies and vampires.
- In Graham Mc Neill's Warhammer 40000 Horus Heresy novel False Gods, the attack on Davin's moon is met by hordes of animated corpses.
- David Moody's Autumn series is somewhat novel in its setup: the story begins with 99% of the world population dying - in the following weeks, some of the victims get better. The most novel aspect of his approach is that for the majority of the first book, the zombies are benign, just wandering about at random, with the result that we can see that "Holy crap, dead people are getting up and walking around," is really freaking scary entirely independent of the possibility of being eaten by a zombie. Of course, at the end, the zombies do become violent, and the whole thing just slips into the mold of the standard survivalist zombie apocalypse story. It is also somewhat novel in that the protagonists plan, for most of the story, to simply wait the zombies out, on the assumption that they will eventually decay past the point of mobility.
- Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth takes place in a fenced-in community several generations after the Zombie Apocalypse.
- A good half of Clark Ashton Smith's work features Zombies of the non-contagious variety, generally custom animated by necromancers. In at least one case they 'outlive' their creators and carry on with what they were doing before they died.
- John Wyndham's 1951 novel The Day Of The Triffids, while concerned with genetically engineered Man Eating Plants, foreshadows many themes of the contemporary Zombie Apocalypse. Society collapses after an atmospheric event causes mass blindness. The sighted and unsighted alike struggle to scavenge a living while being hunted by this new predator. Eventually the sighted protagonists retreat to the countryside and barricade themselves in a farm house, fending off repeated Triffid attacks. The book is heavy with social commentary and contains memorably hellish imagery of shambling, groping masses of humanity. The Triffids themselves have a rickety, limping gait and are slow moving, awkward creatures of little threat individually (unless they catch you unawares). In large numbers, however, they are a serious menace; able to force their way in anywhere and seemingly capable of rudimentary communication and organization. The most effective way of stopping one is to 'decapitate' it using special blade firing weapons. It has been adapted as a lightweight 1962 monster movie (casts the Triffids as extraterrestrial plants) and a more faithful (albeit stagey) 1981 television series. A new series is reportedly in production.
- Star Trek Destiny reveals that this is how the Borg came to be, as a result of two humans lost in the Delta Quadrant getting "possessed" by a starving energy being called a Caeliar, capable of manipulating matter as she saw fit. Then all they did was wait for the locals to come wondering what that huge racket was...
- Another Warhammer 40000 example: the second Soul Drinkers novel features the ridiculously powerful mutant-psyker Teturact, who would induce these, then bring it to a halt while forcing any survivors to worship him as a god. His main starship has been set up so that it can self-destruct and provide a drop assault Zombie Apocalypse.
- David Wellington's Monster Island and its sequels provide Romero-style zombies with an exception: if your brain is provided with oxygen between death and before returning as a zombie, you return as an intelligent zombie which the sequels call a lich. The dead are reanimated as a result of a scientist having pierced the source of LifeEnergy, causing the world to overflow with life energy, reanimating the dead. The trilogy is available online.
- Friday the 13th: The Jason Strain has Jason, while a "special guest" on a Deadly Game, being abducted by scientists, who want to replicate his regenerative abilities and immortality; Jason wakes up partway through the vivisection, rampages through the lab and is exposed to an experimental virus which reacts negatively with him, giving him the ability to reanimate his victims as zombies. Thousands of deaths later the virus is cured and Jason's rid of his new powers. Notably headshots don't stop the zombies - the head needs to be completely eradicated in order for them to be fully (re-)killed. Also, Jason fights a shark in reference to Zombi 2.
- The Concord Virus is a rather traditional example of this trope. It's a short story, but it manages to get the job done.
Live Action TV
- Although the Reavers of Firefly are most definitely alive and not infectious (in any traditional sense of the word - though survivors of Reaver attacks are generally driven insane and compelled to imitate the Reavers), in Serenity, they show some clear Zombie Apocalypse influences.
- One might argue that the Reavers are all the bad traits of Western-movie "Injuns", turned up to eleven. Which does make them rather zombie-like, except for the lack of shambling.
- The Borg of Star Trek fame are almost Zombies In Space! One guest star even referred to them as 'cybernetic zombies.'
- The two-part serial "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" from the 2005 Doctor Who is a neat twist on the Zombie Apocalypse, with alien medical nanobots encountering a dead human child, assuming that's the human baseline, and rebuilding him and all other humans they encounter as shambling corpses. The walking corpses in the earlier episode "The Unquiet Dead" are closer, but they are actually hosts for the ghost-like aliens called the Gelth.
- There's also the episode, "New Earth" set in a hospital in the year 5 billion and twenty-three on, naturally enough, a New Earth which is run by cat people. Towards the end, we find out that the doctors have been growing people in an enormous area under the hospital and exposing them to various diseases from the moment of their conception, which has turned them into your common-or-garden Romero zombie. Of course, the buggers get out and mischief ensues.
- The UK horror series Dead Set involves a zombie apocalypse in Britain, with the plot revolving around the contestants of Big Brother as they are trapped in the house.
- An episode of Star Trek Enterprise has the crew coming across a drifting Vulcan spacecraft whose crew have been affected by the Trellium-D they were mining from nearby asteroids. The insanely aggressive Vulcans stagger after the crew through darkened corridors growling incoherently and, while their bite is not contagious, T'Pol is affected by the Trellium becoming a danger to the others.
- A season two episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer had people being turned into zombies due to a mask that contains the powers of a Nigerian zombie demon.
- Degrassi The Next Generation had a Halloween special called Degrassi of the Dead in which genetically-modified food turns people into zombies, leaving the few surviving students to fight for their lives to escape.
- Although they are not real, in an episode of Spaced, "Art", Tim takes some bad speed and plays videogames, essentially making him hallucinate a zombie attack throughout the whole episode.
- The Twiglets he ate at the party didn't help either.
- Discovery's The Colony is a reality TV show that takes place after a simulated "viral catastrophe". It's basically a zombie apocalypse with the zombies cut out.
- An episode of Smallville dealt with a zombie apocalypse.
Music
- This is the basis for the "Creature Feature" song, Aim For The Head.
- 'Re: Your Brains' by Jonathan Coulton.
- The music video for Metallica's "All Nightmare Long".
New Media
Tabletop Games
- The Tabletop Role Playing Game All Flesh Must Be Eaten is all about surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, with a variety of different Apocalypses in different settings (called "Deadworlds").
- The back story for Unhallowed Metropolis puts a subtle but significant spin on this trope by having the first Plague outbreak occur in 1905.
- In Warhammer Fantasy zombies make up the bulk of the armies of the undead Vampire Counts (alone with other classic horror creatures like wights, ghouls and giant bats). They also use undead dire wolves. These zombies are reanimated corpses animated by the will of the vampire or necromancer who raised them and are slow and weak, relying on numbers to make any impact. Since Vampire Counts magic-users can effectively grow them out of the ground, numbers are NOT something they have trouble with...
- Warhammer 40000 brought on plague zombies during the 13th Black Crusade, courtesy of the god of pestilence and decay, and other zombie infestations have been known to be caused by Tyranids and a fair number of different plants.
- Card Game Magic The Gathering has had zombies since the first set, but the plane of Grixis, one of the Shards of Alara, is in a successful Zombie Apocalypse, albeit with necromancers and demons at the forefront, caused by the crapping out of two types of magic good at fighting them off. In any case, humanity is boned on the plane. Note that in Magic, zombies are not The Virus; they cannot create more of their own kind through infection, but are instead created from corpses by Evil Sorcerers.
- The board game Zombies!!!, which seems to owe some influence to Resident Evil (the players have to shoot the zombies, and they win the game by escaping in a helicopter).
- The GURPS Infinite Worlds setting has the Gotha timelines. Those are about twenty known parallel worlds where civilization was wiped out by the "Gotha Plague": a mutant disease that causes infectees to behave like the 28DaysLater variety. It specifies that the Plague has trouble establishing itself in small communities, so civilization on these worlds is in small enclaves.
- Palladium Books has recently debuted their own Zombie Apocalypse game: Dead Reign. Featuring a mish-mash of tropes and abilities. (The majority of the Zombies are tough, slow-moving ones, but there are also fast zombies, thinking zombies, zombies that don't believe they're zombies, and "half-dead".)
- The Corpse Factories in the Feng Shui supplement Glimpse of the Abyss are Buro-created superzombies that are markedly more intelligent than the non-infectious zombies that they create. Only five of these things exist in 2056, and if just one of them gets loose, it's Zombie Apocalypse time, particularly since the Necromantic Implanter, an arcanowave device that every corpse factory is equipped with, can be used to turn regular zombies into more corpse factories.
- In Exalted, this is one of the favored tactics of the more militarily inclined Deathlords. High level Necromancy can raise corpses en masse, and certain spells can even corrupt an area to the point that the dead will rise of their own accord.
- Deadlands has zombies, but these things are intelligent and cunning. Makes them hard to put down. Particularly if they're intact enough to be shooting back.
- The World Of Darkness games actually subverts the zombie apocalypse. While Zombies do exist, they're not exactly common, and aren't normally infectious. Though, notably, at one point this troper remembers reading an adventure done by Thomas "Wanderer" Wilde (best known for his Resident Evil plot guide) that took this trope head-on, called The Last Escape.
- Dungeons And Dragons zombies are simply mindless, reanimated corpses with no risk of infection, and are among the least dangerous of The Undead. However, there are quite a few undead with the "create spawn" ability, and several of them are incorporeal.
- The "Infectious Zombie" template was provided in the 4th-edition supplement Open Grave. Unfortunately, actual rules for the zombie plague were not, despite being alluded to in the template.
Video Games
- Resident Evil is generally a subversion of this trope. Only Resident Evil two and three deal with anything close to a zombie apocalypse; the rest only involve local outbreaks of The Virus.
- House Of The Dead.
- Dead Rising.
- Saints Row 2 has a zombie arcade game that strongly resembles Dead Rising.
- Left 4 Dead references zombie movies such as 28 Days Later - in fact, the opening credits state "two weeks after first infection", which is 14 days if you count the weekends; half the time of 28 days. One of the characters (Zoey) can utter the following line; "I can't get over how fast they all are. It's not even fair! I'm calling zombie bullshit on that, you know? They're not allowed to be so fast."
- The Virus in Left 4 Dead also seems to be a fairly flexible type. Whilst it turns most people into common cannon fodder zombies, what little backstory exists suggests that it can target certain aspects of infectees to create the Special Infected. Infection is transferred via bite, and can take approximately an hour to set in depending on circumstances. Certain people seem to be 'blessed' with utter immunity (or were just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time; ie, offshore or in the air and nowhere near the spreading infection), making the four heroes not the sole survivors.
- A theory is that copious intake of certain substances can change your inner chemistry enough to react to the infection. The Boomers are severe alcoholics, the Smokers are multiple packs a day chain smokers, The Hunters are meth fiends, The Witches crack whores, and the Tanks juicers.
- Also note that in the intro movie, Bill notes that the zombies are mutating, so it could be different strains of the virus.
- There is also a subversion to the rule that the zombies don't fight each other, but it happens so rarely that you may not see it at all at first.
- This has been proven true, as players have discovered that the Infected can startle the Witch as well, effectively making a Zombie vs. Zombie battle.
- And it's not just the Witch either, but you can also have two regular zombies just beating the crap out of each other until one them dies with the winner then shuffling around like nothing happened (they also attack objects like walls or boxes). The Special Infected will not attack each other, but there have been a few occasions where the Tank kills its own kind due to the other zombies getting in the way of its target and it also happens in the opening intro movie.
- It's also common in the First Person Shooter genre, where it fills the "people you can shoot at without feeling bad about it" niche.
- Both Doom and Quake, in both cases supernatural (and in neither case the main threat to humanity). In the former game, the zombies were undead foot soldiers (a few pistol shots would do one in permanently), still using the firearms they had been carrying in life (though Doom 3 introduced more regular walking corpses; which were originally intended to keep getting up as long as their corpse was intact, as revealed in a leaked beta; this was dropped from the final version because the Ragdoll Physics added to their deaths made it impractical). In the latter the zombies were shambling long-dead corpses in the Russo mould (nothing short of dismembering them with explosives would keep them down), though much more easily killed "grunts" more like the Doom zombies were found in the early levels of each episode (these may well have been still living, but possessed or otherwise mind-controlled). The Wolfenstein 3D games also had re-animated corpses as enemies, these created by Nazi Mad Science.
- Quake 4 features partially Stroggified humans whom for all intents and purposes behave like zombies, this is Lampshaded by another soldier.
- The Doom novelization had especially creepy scenes where zombies, still bearing an imprint of their former lives, would mindlessly shamble to the grocery store, pulling rotting food from the shelves, walking past the cash register, and so on.
- Quake's instruction manual explained that the Grunts had had cybernetics wired into their brain that stimulated their pleasure centers whenever they killed someone.
- In Halo, the Flood are a zombie-like race. They hatch as little face-hugger bugs that swarm at you by the hundred. If they manage to attach, you grow a yellow shell and live to serve the Flood (wielding the weapons you held in life). Eventually, you grow huge and bloated, and when you die, you hatch out dozens of tiny little face-huggers. Subverted in the fact that they can only infect live people (one insane marine survives and babbles about how he pretended to be dead and was left alone). In the second and third games, the Flood spreads and wipes out several major players of the game. In fact, you discover that the Halo itself was built as a weapon against the flood. When activated, the seven Halos kill all sentient life in the galaxy, starving the flood of their necessary nutrition. This has happened before and nearly happens in all three games.
- The third game also has a multiplayer mode where someone is "infected" and spreads it by killing people with the energy sword, and they come back to do the same. Eventually, you have a few regular people left heading for the high ground to snipe as much as they can before being overwhelmed. It is very unlikely (though possible with a few skilled players working together) for survivors to last until the en of the round. Infection variants on modified maps make up the Living Dead weekened event.
- Counter-Strike had an influence on this, where the most favored zombie mode, Infection, has the opposing side as fast-running zombies, and the other as C Ts/Ts. Whoever is hit by a zombie is turned into one, and so on.
- The Time Splitters games are rather fond of zombies, and gives them amusing names like Gilbert Gastric, Daisy Dismay, and Mr. Fleshcage. The third game even had them quote a recurring line from Shaun of the Dead as a tribute, because Time Splitters 2 had a cameo in the film (as the FPS game that Ed and Shaun play).
- Blood, a game created around horror movie tropes, had its fair share of zombies (the tougher variety's appearance directly cribbed from Romero's Night of the Living Dead). In the sequel, living dead were replaced by people taken over by supernatural wormlike parasitic beings.
- The various games in the Half Life series all have small creatures named Headcrabs that attach to people and turn them into "Headcrab Zombies". In this game, again, unless you immolate or seriously damage the body or kill the headcrab, the zombie keeps on going. If you hit the body wrong, you can kill the zombie but leave the headcrab alive, which has a long jump as well as a crawl. Or the zombie's body is cut in half, and the torso continues to crawl at you. There is also the Zombine, which is a fast armored zombie that has a grenade he can try to clobber you with, making him an unwitting suicide bomber.
- The Poison Headcrab Zombie, bloated and swollen with toxins and carrying four venomous headcrabs, as well as the Fast Headcrab Zombie, which climbs up drainpipes to reach you on rooftops, can jump across streets as it hunts you, and pounces with a pants-wetting scream. *Twitch*. *Tremble*.
- The utterly terrifying sounds the Poison Zombies make when they breath... and, of course, that god-awful but thankfully hard-to-hear little chuckle they release just after being killed. That's right. They laugh quietly to themselves when you kill them.
- Aside from their alien origins, the most notable thing about Half Life zombies is that they are not the primary threat. That would be the Combine.
- The most terrifying part: well, at least normal zombies seem to keep awareness of their condition. That's right, those rotting, mutated, living bodies still house human minds. Which beg for mercy.
- The MMORPG Urban Dead. Unlike other examples, the zombies in this game are intelligent since they are controlled by players. While they do have a limited vocabulary, zombie players have come up with creative ways of in-game communication. And that's not even counting the Metagame on the forums. It also emulates the Romero model of zombies getting smarter. As they learn more skills, zombies can open doors, move faster, attack better, talk (sort of), track you down, and make a lot of noise to draw attention when they find a safehouse full of survivors. If one counts the RP, they're also highly mutated, undying, and God help us if they break from the quarantine. To be fair, a lot are still Romero-style mind shamblers from the early, "official" player created story. Then again, a lot of zombies play as "death cultists", alive but obviously still rotten half-humans that get particularly nasty with weapons, and This Troper has personally seen undead beings that Umbrella would love to get their hands on. (Read: Weird players.)
- The final level of The Simpsons: Hit and Run is populated by zombies that can be run over, due to Kang and Kodos infecting Springfield with BUZZ Cola for kicks and television ratings.
- The game The Sims 2 has zombies (introduced in one of the expansions). Their "thought bubble" tends to contain a brain. In the game, they only appear if they are created on purpose by the player. A mod on one of the most popular modding sites, MATY, changes their behavior so that they will fight and infect other characters in the game. The mod, aptly enough, is called Zombie Apocalypse.
- The first The Sims game also had zombies, included in the first expansion pack. When a sim died and you pleaded with the Grim Reaper, you had a 25% chance of keeping that sim, only as a zombie with no personality points, and a green tint to their skin and clothing.
- The fifth expansion pack, "Unleashed," included an NPC who could "revivify" zombie sims, for a fee of course. Their personalities never returned, however.
- They Hunger, set in a small town and acres of farmland and ruins, appears to use modified Russo rules - the zombies are tough, but they're still killable and don't need headshots (indeed, shooting them anywhere for long enough drops them). It also includes semi-infected zombies who are smart enough to still use guns, and two of them are bosses.
- The grunt troops of the Scourge in Warcraft III and World Of Warcraft are all zombies, reanimated by the Lich King or his necromancers. In Warcraft III, most of them are infected by contaminated food supplies rather than being killed by other zombies, altho the Lich King is know to raise troops that have died in battle against the undead. Those who are freed from the Lich King's control before they decay too much will regain their sentience, but obviously remain as rotting corpses. In honor of the upcoming Scourge-focused expansion, suspicious crates and infected roaches have begun to find their way into various World Of Warcraft cities. Coming in contact with one wil give your character the scourge toxin, and turn them into a ghoul...whereupon you get to rampage through civilization shouting for brains and infecting everything with a pulse (subsequently recruiting them for the zombie cause). It's one of those things which can either be incredible fun or rather upsetting.
- The Scourge forces also expand on the standard reanimation of dead corpses due to there being a number of necromancers deliberately creating more dangerous undead, leading to zombie giants, giant zombie dogs, zombie dragons, and huge constructs made from combining the flesh of women and children.
- Death Knights are subversion in that the one's that joined the Lich King willingly aren't dead at all. All the others are powerful warriors that died at the hands of the Scourge and were immediately resurrected as the Lich King's elite troops. Due to this they haven't had time to adequately decay and usually just have paler skin. Also they retain their memories and personality after being resurrected, though they are still bound to the will of the Lich King.
- As the title character of Stubbs The Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, you get to play a zombie, bringing terror to the Zeerust utopia of Punchbowl.
- Possession, which, in addition to being able to lead a variety of zombies (slow, fast, intelligent, mutated, you name it) has the main character as a sentient zombie unleashing chaos on a corporate-controlled city.
- Most [=RPGs=] that involve dungeon-crawling will have some sort of zombies as a monster, usually found in the creepy Dark Temple/haunted house/graveyard setting. They may induce status effects, but are treated like any other monster in this case.
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has a variety of zombie monsters (including a headless [sub]version), along with necromancers and vampires who share their quarters with corpses, both animated and not. Spells can also be purchased that allow the player to summon a zombie, and the Mages Guild focuses on the extermination of necromancy, culminating in the acquisition of a staff that reanimates the bodies of the recently deceased.
- The Shivering Isles expansion pack introduces new enemies, which includes "flesh atronachs" of varying degrees, and skinned hounds. A "summon flesh atronach" spell can be obtained, and a skinned hound is the reward for one of the random quests. Furthermore, the player can spend quite a lot of time fighting the living impaired (including corpses that only reanimate when approached), and can even assist a charming woman in the parts selection (and subsequent rebuilding ritual) of a very large opponent.
- The CRPG Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines set in The World Of Darkness features a mission called "You Only Die Once a Night" where the Hollywood graveyard caretaker Romero (!) asks you to keep hordes of mindless zombies from breaking out of the cemetery. Even though you only have to hold them off for five minutes, this troper has never been able to beat the mission. Infuriatingly enough, Romero has only given you the job of watching the graveyard so he can go out and buy porn! Some people neglect any duty they're given, it seems, which is why you're given the option of finding a prostitute for Romero instead of staying behind to cause a zombie apocalypse. Or, if female and with sufficient looks and poise, seducing him instead. The title card hilariously reads "Romero gets some lovin'."
- There's also an earlier mission where you have to track down and kill the members of a cult of vampires that deliberately infects their meals with a horrible virus. You have to fight your way through a horde of zombies before you can take the last one on.
- Metal Gear Solid 4. Well, not exactly, but half-way through the game, when Liquid represses the Mercenary Army's nanomachines, causing their emotion and reason to flood back into their brain, the PM Cs in the area are brain damaged. Guess what? They shamble, moan, and are pretty much Classic-Romero zombies, to the point of mindlessly rushing Snake (and not reacting to any sort of stimuli). There's no biting or undead stuff, though.
- Space Quest V has the mutant Pukoids fulfilling this trope.
- In the Japanese PS2 game The Zombie vs. Kyuukyuusha ("Zombie vs. Ambulance", and yes that's the real title), you drive around a zombie-infested city in an ambulance, attempting to rescue people and take them back to the hospital that serves as your home base so you can inoculate them against the zombie plague. If you take too long getting people back to base, they turn into zombies and start damaging your ambulance from the inside. And you can upgrade your ambulance so it can take more damage and more easily plow through hordes of zombies.
- This game is part of the "Simple 2000" series of budget titles, which also features a game called "The Oneechanbara" ("Zombie Zone" in the West), in which you play a bikini-wearing samurai girl who goes around slicing up zombies. While the gameplay isn't particularly brilliant, the game is definitely fun. It's proven so popular that sequels have been released on the Wii and X Box 360, and there's even a movie. As a side note, in Oneechanbara, the Zombie Apocalypse is actually caused by the lead characters — well, they, and some of the villains. They have a "Baneful Blood" curse. If blood touches their skin, it builds power in them — with the downside that this power will eventually drive them insane and kill them. Meanwhile, their blood kills people and turns them into contagious zombies.
- Battle For Wesnoth's Walking Corpses, and their level-up, the Soullesses. They follow the Russo rules, for the most part: any unit killed by a Walking Corpse or Soulless becomes a Walking Corpse or Soulless on the side of the Corpse that killed them, simulating The Virus.
- Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend features Mad Cow Tourettes zombies (apparently Tourette's syndrome sufferers who ate mad cow-infected meat). They normally shamble slowly, but can sometimes be seen stumbling forwards quickly (catching the player off-guard); they throw chunks of their own flesh to attack; their heads must be completely destroyed to kill them (merely cutting them off will do no good); and (for no other reason than the fact that the world of Postal 2 is already messed up as it is) you can resurrect dead zombies by pissing on them.
- A new MMO currently in Beta, Dead Frontier, takes place after a Zombie Apocalypse with the player as one of a handful of survivors who must constantly make supply runs into the city, which has been overrun by zombies of many shapes, sizes and speeds, to procure food, medical supplies, new weapons and ammunition. It's important to note that most everyone has a place in the new society, such as doctors, engineers and even chefs, and those who try to go it alone may find themselves as zombie food more often than they'd like.
- The FPS S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl has zombies in one part of the game, who are actually stalkers who have been mind raped by psychic emissions in certain parts of the zone.
- In City Of Heroes and City Of Villains, zombies are counted among the servants of the Banished Pantheon and the minions of Dr. Vahzilok. Also, the Halloween events feature zombies that spawn from trick-or-treating, and the 2008 incarnation featured zombies crawling from the ground en masse. Finally, the Mastermind Necromancy primary set lets player villains summon their own zombie minions.
- An infinite number of zombies usually appears early on in Castlevania games. Fortunately they're much easier to kill than the average movie zombie.
- In a similar fashion, countless zombies (and other things) plague our hero in Ghosts 'n Goblins.
- A new game call The Last Guy features the zombie hero (?) rounding up the various survivors of a zombie apocalypse. From the looks of it, the zombies have devolved (or evolved) into large, dangerous, non-human things, however.
- The PSP game Infected, as in the quote above, features a massive zombie apocalypse in New York City, played Smash TV style. The player is Officer Stevens, whose blood is not only immune to The Virus, but actively destroys zombies, who are nigh-invulnerable to everything (it's implied they destroyed a tank battalion, and were able to wield weapons) by causing infected blood to explode. This results in the guys in charge of the quarantine to strap a blood gun to one arm of Stevens, give him/her weapons, and run around NYC, splattering zombies. For the record, the game is hilarious and fun, but short.
- System Shock 2 had zombies as the first stage of infection by alien parasitic worms, including shambling, strange speech patterns, no vital signs, etc. Oh yeah, and they're still conscious, aware of what they're doing against their will, and apologise while they attack you and beg you to kill them. Later stages were considerably more monstrous, and quite un-zombie like.
- Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ. A grown-up Little Red Riding Hood vs. zombified versions of classic Fairy Tale characters. Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
- In Elite Beat Agents, one of the missions involves helping a peanut salesman fighting off against giggling zombies that start to attack the town. By sheer luck, the zombies happen to be allergic to peanuts. Huh.
- It was more like that the peanuts tasted so bad that the zombies were returned to normal after ingesting them. Also, they spread the plague via kisses, and the episode's animation during the song segments was done in the style of FPS.
- Siren - these are particularly notable, as they retain some of their intelligence and memories of their former life, and although they become murderous and gradually lose the ability to speak language intelligible to humans, they try to re-enact their living life if not over-ruled by the Hive Mind; as the game was first released in Japan in 2003, and EU and US in '04, this actually predates the use of this concept in Land of the Dead, although not the precursors to it seen in Day of the Dead.
- The game Overlord features an area infested with zombies, as a mysterious and agonizing plague turns its victims into the living dead. In a twist keeping with its tone and sense of humor, it's caused by the proximity of a slutty, disease-ridden Succubus Queen; apparently, what's a harmless STD to a demoness is a virulent Zombie Apocalypse-inducing epidemic for humans.
- Two prominent freeware games from Ska Software that is Survival Crisis Z and Zombie Smashers.
- The flash game Super Energy Apocalypse: Recycled features a zombie apocalypse where zombies grow stronger the more pollution there is.
- Mad World has the Hunter's Castle, which had it's entire foundation shipped from the quaint country of Zombikistan, but it also came with it's cheif export: ZOMBIES! They're even tougher than the normal version, being able to regenerate until somone decapitates them.
- In Mortal Kombat: Deception, Liu Kang (former poster boy for the series) is resurrected as a zombie, and completes the transformation by being Chained By Fashion.
- The Virus in Prototype is something like this, only about ten to fifty times worse. For one, unlike most Zombie Apocalypses, it spreads like highly contagious disease, rather than just happening to already dead people or like something more akin to rabies. Then you get to things like the Hunters and Hydras.
- Discussed and specifically averted in Tsukihime, though in regards to a Vampire Apocalypse instead. Shiki naturally points out that if there are vampires, and they have to feed so much, then why are there still so few? Arcueid points out that A. vampires don't get along well with each other and fight a lot and B. organizations such as The Church hunting them down, so they keep a low profile and avoiding making too many minions to avoid unwanted attention.
- This seemed to be the original concept behind Raving Rabbids, but they decided to go with party games.
- In Fun Orb's Zombie Dawn game, you play as the Evil Overlord responsible for the zombie apocalypse. Unlike most zombie apocalypse stories, these zombies are being controlled by someone - you. Also, the government is actually pretty competent. Anyone attacked by a zombie instantly comes back as one.
- Plants Vs Zombies, you have to fight off a zombie uprising in your own backyard using nothing but aggressive plants.
- No mention of Zombies Ate My Neighbors?? The zombies in that game are fairly weak (they can be killed with squirt guns), and aren't contagious. However it is possible to temporarily be turned into a zombie by drinking a mystery potion, causing your character to wander around and kill any survivors they touch.
- Zombies are a part of the Necromancer's army throughout most of the Heroes Of Might And Magic series. They also happen to be slow and weak units (compared to most units of the same tier). You can't even make that many of them. It is however possible to make a looot of skeletons in most of the games. In an average sized map it's not too hard to build an army with over a thousand skeletons, thus creating a skeleton apocalypse.
Web Comics
Web Original
- Fledgling Survival Of The Fittest Alternate Universe RP SOTF Zombies sees a group of ten survivors attempting to fend off the reanimated bodies of their dead classmates to make it to the coastline, where a rescue boat awaits.
- A prominent Image Board's Weapons-oriented component routinely sees threads of what would you do during a Zombie Apocalypse. Anything from where would you go, to what weapons and ammo and supplies you carry is brought up. The board is getting fairly sick of it at this point.
Western Animation
Other
- For their April Fools 2008 issue, The University at Buffalo's Spectrum college newspaper reported, among other things, about the emergence of the Necro-Animatory Syndrome virus, and the rise of the ambulatory dead ("zombie" being an "outdated and offensive term," though Bush is quoted as nearly using it) out of Cape Canaveral, where the NAS virus had apparently come back with a space shuttle crew. Articles included general information, survival guide, how to recognize an NAS sufferer(not very hard), and what to do if you're bitten(die with dignity, and with a friend to take you out immediately).
- This fake BBC article claimed that a Zombie Outbreak had occurred in Cambodia and was hushed up by the government. It was debunked on Snopes.com but is still passed around from time to time.
- The BBC put out another article, this time playing on the Swine Flu scare (H 1 Z 1, a mutation of the H 1 N 1 virus that reanimated the victim after death, who then showed signs of the usual zombie behaviour). It is of course, fake, but the comments on the page are well worth reading.
- Thriller
- Some smart-ass hacker in Austin, Texas broke into the controls of two electronic road signs in January of 2009, replacing their usual notices about upcoming construction with warnings of, among other things, "Zombies ahead!". Drivers were amused; city safety officials were not.
Theatre
- Rhinocéros is a play by French author Eugene Ionesco that revolves around people spontaneously becoming rhinocerotes. They're destructive, but not violent, and one must apparently choose to become one (or at least not actively choose not to). Though mostly comedic, it still has the feel of a Zombie Apocalypse, not least because there's only one man left standing at the end.
Real Life
- Zombie Squad is a disaster-preparedness group that uses the metaphor of a Zombie Apocalypse to encourage people to prepare for real-life emergencies, on the principle that if one is prepared for the dead to rise from their graves en masse to feed on the living, and the ensuing collapse of civil order that would inevitably ensue, that dealing with something as prosaic as an earthquake or hurricane is small potatoes.
- The Humans vs Zombies massively multiplayer live-action tag game.
- It was for fear of this that medićval societies either burned witches or cremated them after hanging them (depended on various factors). It sounds strange, but when you remember that the definition of a witch in those days was that s/he had given him/herself over to the devil...
- Any day now...
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